Project Bento goes live on the Main Grid

On Tuesday 31st May, Linden Lab announced that Project Bento has now gone live on the Main Grid which is great news to hear. Since late 2015 the Lab have been testing Project Bento on the Aditi test grid with the help of content creators from across the grid.

This release pushes to a much wider audience than before. This is a new era for mesh avatars in Second Life and I would imagine soon there will be more realistic avatars with greater detail than ever before. Yay! 🙂

Project Bento is an extension to the existing avatar skeleton to include many new bones, joints, and attachment points. These new bones support rigging and animation to provide the opportunity for a much wider range of avatar body types, facial expressions, and animations than is currently possible in Second Life.

Read the full announcement here

Since late 2015 we have been testing a limited release for Project Bento on the Aditi test grid, working with content creators. Today we’re announcing the second wave of Bento skeleton improvements!

This release will be available on Agni, making it available to a much wider audience. However, this is still a limited release, until we’re confident enough that this could be a release candidate and ultimately be part of the release Viewer. Creators, recipients, and anyone wishing to view the new content must be running the latest Bento Project Viewer.

If you encounter Bento avatars and are not using the Bento Project Viewer, you may see some strangely behaving avatar animations and meshes. If you’re using a very old (i.e. no longer supported) viewer, encountering Bento content may even cause a crash; updating to the latest Bento Project Viewer will prevent this problem.